Links, Writing Notebooks

Quotable Quotes

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At Megaquotes, there’s quite a list of quotes about writing. The ones below made me think about my own notebooks:

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948 (All those nice fresh notebooks that didn’t seem as beautifully-filled as I wanted them to be!)

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. ~Norbet Platt

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Emme Woodhull-Bäche (Look at how much time people spend figuring out which pen is best for a Moleskine!)

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. ~Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989

Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies….
~Denise Levertov, “A Walk through the Notebooks”

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. ~Juvenal, Satires

I keep little notepads all over the place to write down ideas as soon as they strike, but the ones that fill up the quickest are always the ones at my nightstand. ~Emily Logan Decens

Diary, Journal, My Collection, Personal

Last Night I Dreamed…

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… about notebooks.

I was in some kind of Home Depot-like store, and saw that they were selling the kind of diary I used to use in the mid-80s, when I was in high school. They were exactly 3×5, with a black faux-leather cover. In the front, they had pages with measurement conversions, city populations, a mini-Farmer’s Almanac, and other useful tidbits of information.
Then each page was split over two days, so you had 4 days to a spread. I tended to fill each day with things like “Debbie called. I helped Jeff with the physics homework. Read another Tintin book.” At the back of the diary, there were pages to write addresses and telephone numbers, and pages for recording expenses. They really tried to squeeze a lot into these little diaries, almost like a Filofax but without the option to pick and choose what you’d actually use.

In my dream, the diaries were packaged in those plastic things that hang on a hook and are impossible to cut open once you get them home. I was all excited to be able to buy this kind of diary again, even though I wouldn’t really have much use for it now. I started to look around the store to see what other kinds of notebooks they had, and I could see that there were many other interesting ones to look at… but then I woke up.

Originally posted at 3x5life

Journal, Links, Moleskine, Moleskine myth-busting, Writing Notebooks

“Creation versus Consumption”

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Here’s an interesting article from The Simple Dollar, in which the writer’s notebooks are a key example of something many of us struggle with:

I like pocket notebooks. During my years as a young professional who still harbored some little sliver of a dream of someday becoming a writer, I would often pick up a wonderful, shiny, expensive new Moleskine pocket notebook. I’d keep it with me for a while, sitting down at coffee shop tables and opening it up before me, dreaming little dreams of being a great writer. On occasion, I might even write something down in that notebook.

But, after a while, I’d put it aside somewhere – in a dresser drawer or somewhere else – and then a few months later, the bug would strike me again. So I’d buy another nice, shiny, new notebook and fill up a few pages with jottings, only to eventually add it to my ever-growing pile of journals and pads here and there around the house.

Skip forward to today. Today, I keep a tiny, dirt-cheap Mead memo notebook in my pocket at all times. And I use it and abuse it. I fill that thing from top to bottom with notes, and it’s often a race with time as to whether I beat the notebook to death before I fill it with my notes….

What good is a notebook if it’s not collecting your thoughts? What good is a pair of running shoes if you’re not out running? What good is a keyboard if you’re not practicing your music?

A lot of us want to accomplish something great. We want to read the great works of Western literature. We want to train for and run in a 5K. We want to write the “Great American Novel.” We want to have the perfect home for our family.

The truth is that no product on earth will ever make these things happen…. You can have all the slick notebooks in the world, but if they’re just filled with empty pages, they’re useless.

Do you agree? Is a notebook obsession sometimes a symptom of creative paralysis, and of throwing money at a problem to try to solve it? Or does a nice notebook stimulate creativity in a way that a beat-up Mead memo pad wouldn’t, making the money spent on expensive journals a good investment?

Diary, Journal, Links

More Thoughts on Notebooks After Death

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From Continental Op

The other day I purchased a $200 fountain pen. It is an extravagant pen. But, I spend so much of my time writing my thoughts down that it actually seems worth the price. Anyway, it occurred to me the other night that I have so many notebooks that I want to destroy. They are notebooks to me…not journals. To call them journals would imply that there is a perseverance of thought to the things I write. There is none. In fact, most of my writings would make sense only to me. None of these notebooks are anything I want to leave behind when I am no longer alive. In fact, I dread the fact that someone would go through them after my death and try to make sense of them…

Thus, out of necessity, I dreamed up the RAD Journal. More precisely the Read After Death Journal.

Art, HandBook, Journal, My Collection, Personal

Animal Art

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Here are some animal sketches from the recent safari trip. A pocket size notebook is a great thing to bring on safari, especially if, like me, you’re not a photography nut. I brought a tiny digital camera (a Casio Exilim, which also happens to be my favorite golden rectangle-ish shape, though much smaller than 3×5) and I did take hundreds of photos, but I found that trying to capture things in drawings was more fun. You don’t have a lot of time, as the animals are moving and the safari vehicle is moving and your fellow travelers are jostling around trying to get their photos. But in the end, I filled a sketchbook with drawings that became a very personal memento of the trip.



Originally posted at 3x5life

Diary, Journal, record-keeping

Notebook Uses: Food and Exercise Journal

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Here’s someone who is just starting to use a notebook to track food and exercise:

First things first, to find out if I can keep track of my eating and exercising, I have started a food and exercise journal. This is nothing fancy right now, it is just a spiral notebook left over from school. Once I have proven to myself that I can actually keep track of everything I want to keep track of, and that I want to continue with this nonsense, I might actually buy a Moleskine or some other “nice” notebook.

The format of my notebook is currently free form. I tried to find some templates, but this apparently is not as common as I would have thought. I think I will discover would have been a helpful template to follow.

Drawing the line in the sand, I wrote down my weight, bodyfat percentage and all the common lifting measurement (arm, thigh, waist, chest, hips and neck)

This brings up two common notebook questions:
If you are just starting to use a notebook, is it better to try it with a cheap one and then upgrade to a nice one once you’ve gotten into a routine? Or is it better to start with a nice notebook to encourage yourself to keep using it?
Is it better to use a notebook that has blank, free form pages, or is it easier to have template pages when the use is something specific like this?

Notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, diaries: in search of the perfect page…